Same as It Ever Was: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Roll

Deep into last night’s primary coverage, even Rachel Maddow’s indefatigable good cheer seemed to be a tad forced as the MSNBC crew—like their rivals on Fox and CNN—began yet another hour of chewing over What It All Means. Especially as what it all means was pretty much what it’s all meant for the past several weeks: While the Democratic nomination looks to be a months-long steeplechase, it’s clear that Hillary Clinton is going to beat the dark horse Bernie Sanders; and while Donald Trump keeps racking up wins and knocking out opponents (Buh-bye, Little Marco), he looks unlikely to officially sew up the nomination before the GOP convention.

The evening had barely begun before Marco Rubio’s crushing loss to Trump in Florida ended his presidential run. He officially suspended his campaign, and in the way of so many losing candidates, blamed the zeitgeist (“a real political storm”) and sought cosmic consolation. “God is perfect. God makes no mistakes,” he told the crowd of supporters, making one wonder why God wanted this cute young senator to keep losing. One suspects that this failure had less to do with a divine master plan for Rubio than it did with the candidate’s own faults—his robotic meltdown in New Hampshire, his grade-school taunting of Donald Trump, and his all-too-sweaty ambition. As Fox’s sardonic, drain-voiced Brit Hume noted, Rubio couldn’t even win his home state, in large part because Floridians thought he was too much “a young man in a hurry”—a guy who couldn’t bother to actually do the job in the senate they elected him to. It was one measure of his bad night that Rubio was even heckled during his concession speech (presumably by a Trump supporter), something I’ve never even heard of, let alone seen.

If Rubio couldn’t hold up his end of the party’s Stop Trump bargain, Ohio Governor John Kasich did, using his favorite son status (and his huge popularity in the local GOP) to beat The Donald by more than 10 points. In celebration, he gave a disheveled, I’m-a-nice-guy speech where he talked of the good things yet to come for his campaign. With his hugs and talk of unity, he is undeniably the fuzziest of the remaining GOP candidates (though it isn’t hard to be fuzzier than Trump and Ted Cruz). If you’re an admirer, I hope you enjoyed Kasich’s victory speech because you probably won’t see another. The only people who seem to think he has a prayer of winning are on the left—Chris Matthews clearly has a soft spot for him, and Maddow seems pleasantly surprised that he’s so, well, human. In contrast, the GOP analysts on MSNBC give him virtually no chance, and over on Fox, they scoffed at the idea that he will be the nominee. For them, he clearly seems like glorified roadkill—a solid, uncharismatic guy who’s wandered on the highway where Trump and Cruz are tooling along in their heavily-armed Humvees. Sounds like a potential vice president!

Although he’d lost Florida, North Carolina, and Illinois to Trump, and Ohio to Kasich, Cruz spent the night clinging to his forlorn hope of grabbing a win in Missouri. As he awaited the results, he did what what he always does. He insisted that he’s the only one who can beat Trump. Each time I hear Cruz say this, I’m always reminded of that bit from The Social Network when Mark Zuckerberg says to the Winklevoss twins, If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook. If Cruz is the one who can beat Donald Trump, how come he doesn’t beat him? He even loses in the South with its huge Evangelical electorate.

Then again, I’m not about to count Cruz out. And here’s why. For starters, he’s running the best campaign of anyone when it comes to maximizing his potential vote—these guys have mastered the details. Now that Rubio’s gone, I expect him to start sticking his shiv into his opponent on the stump while his team practices the dirty, behind-the-scenes witchcraft that will determine who are the delegates at what looks to be a wide-open convention. I’m not sure this will be enough to defeat Trump, but I’m already impressed that the Texas senator—whose conservatism is too extreme for most Republicans, let alone the rest of America—has gotten this far. It takes real political talent to be a senator so hated that only one of your colleagues will endorse you and still be one of the two top contenders.

Of course, in this year of surprises, nobody has come farther than Trump who took Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, and (it seems) Missouri. At 15 minutes, his victory speech offered “brevity by normal Trump standards,” as Brian Williams wryly put it. The essence of The Donald’s campaign is that he’s an entertainer—he’s been known to refer to his rallies as “shows”—and last night he did a genuinely funny bit about being at a golf tournament with his rich friends and trying to distract them when the many, many anti-Trump commercials came on TV in the clubhouse. No other candidate would do something like that. Such moments boast an authenticity whose appeal you can understand, even if you don’t succumb to it. Still, that doesn’t keep most of his promises from being laughable. Last night, he claimed that when he’s president Apple will make its products in America and not China or Vietnam (as if this was something President Obama was simply too dumb to do). Naturally, he didn’t explain how he would make that happen.

Then again, Trump’s campaign isn’t about explanations. It’s about feelings, many of them happy—people get a kick out of his shtick—but some downright scary. I wouldn’t want to be one of the anti-Trump delegates on the convention floor if he’s won most of the states and a plurality of the delegates and the party gives the nomination to—who? “Lying Ted?” “Little Marco?” “Loser Mitt” (who’s clearly pining for that Draft Romney movement)? It’s the party’s right to do this, of course—heck, it’s even written into the rules—but if you think last Friday’s scuffling in Chicago was ugly, the GOP’s convention in Cleveland could make that seem like a love-in. At the moment, that’s where the Republicans appear to be headed. The only thing that could potentially unite this fractured party is its pathological hatred of Hillary Clinton, whom the right has viewed as a left-wing she-devil for a quarter-century.

She’ll be there waiting. That much is clear. Team Clinton had, as NBC’s Andrea Mitchell noted, “a spectacular night”—she swept the board. Hillary won huge in Florida and North Carolina. She surprised herself a bit by winning Ohio (which her campaign had secretly thought they would lose), surprised herself even more by apparently taking Missouri (she expected Sanders to win it), and delighted herself by overcoming the unpopularity of Rahm Emanuel to take Illinois. These four wins not only put her almost un-catchably far ahead in the delegate count but totally doused Sanders’s post-Michigan momentum. Being a message candidate with money, he will keep running, of course, but that won’t change much. On this long March night, Bernie’s mojo finally ran out of gas.